Left-wing magazine shoots down premise on which Mueller investigation is based

The narrative that laid the groundwork for the ongoing Russia investigations and a year’s worth of major media accusations is wrong, according to The Nation magazine.

Russia did not hack Democratic National Committee (DNC) email servers, a left-wing publication has concluded after examining evidence from computer analysts and former NSA officials.

An internal leaker was likely the source of the confidential DNC emails that were sent to WikiLeaks, the magazine said. The emails revealed a DNC plot to ensure Hillary Clinton was the Democratic Party’s nominee over Sen. Bernie Sanders.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has long insisted that Russia was not the source of the leaked emails.

Writing for The Nation, Patrick Lawrence cited the central role the “DNC hack” plays in the “Russiagate” narrative:

“All this was set in motion when the DNC’s mail server was first violated in the spring of 2016 and by subsequent assertions that Russians were behind that ‘hack’ and another such operation, also described as a Russian hack, on July 5. These are the foundation stones of the edifice just outlined. The evolution of public discourse in the year since is worthy of scholarly study: Possibilities became allegations, and these became probabilities. Then the probabilities turned into certainties, and these evolved into what are now taken to be established truths.”

The analysts cited by Lawrence examined how the emails were made public and concluded they were transferred to a data storage device at a speed not possible over the Internet. Metadata also indicate that the emails were taken by someone in the Eastern Daylight Timezone and then deliberately copy-and-pasted into a Microsoft Word file that had its language settings changed to Russian in a ruse to throw off investigators, the analysts said.

The conclusions of the investigators was unanimous, Lawrence wrote:

“All those interviewed came in between 90 percent and 100 percent certain that the forensics prove out. I have already quoted Skip Folden’s answer: impossible based on the data. ‘The laws of physics don’t lie,’ Ray McGovern volunteered at one point. ‘It’s QED, theorem demonstrated,’ William Binney said in response to my question. ‘There’s no evidence out there to get me to change my mind.’ When I asked Edward Loomis, a 90 percent man, about the 10 percent he held out, he replied, ‘I’ve looked at the work and it shows there was no Russian hack. But I didn’t do the work. That’s the 10 percent. I’m a scientist.’ ”

Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning issued the following statement on in response to Lawrence’s piece:

“If the whole premise of the [Special Counsel Robert] Mueller investigation, that Russia hacked the DNC emails interfering with the elections, is in fact false and it was a DNC insider as the Nation reports former NSA officials contending, there is simply no rationale for the special counsel to continue investigating the Russia angle. It is incumbent upon the Justice Department to determine and settle once and for all the true source of the DNC emails.

“The only prosecutions that can flow from that investigation must be of Obama administration officials who covered up the real facts surrounding the DNC emails, setting the nation off on this new red scare. If Mueller is unwilling to go where the evidence leads, in this case to the DNC itself and the Obama administration cover-up, then he is not fit to serve. In Mueller’s case, this is either obstruction or willful blindness.”

The DNC has dismissed The Nation’s conclusions and continues to insist the Russians did it.

“U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded the Russian government hacked the DNC in an attempt to interfere in the election. Any suggestion otherwise is false and is just another conspiracy theory like those pushed by Trump and his administration,” Adrienne Watson, the DNC’s deputy communications director, told Breitbart News on Aug. 10.

The DNC reaches its conclusions that Russia is behind the “hack” via an “Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA)” issued in January, days before President Barack Obama left office. The ICA was quoted for months in the major media as being prepared by “all 17” American intelligence agencies.

As the New York Times finally admitted in June, the ICA was the work of only three intelligence agencies. Hillary Clinton used the “17 intelligence agencies” line in her second presidential debate performance.

Lawrence’s article in The Nation further takes the ICA to task:

“James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, admitted in May that ‘hand-picked’ analysts from three agencies (not the 17 previously reported) drafted the ICA,” Lawrence wrote, pointing out that not even the whole of the three agencies cited (the FBI, NSA, and CIA) were involved but only a few staffers “hand-picked” by Clapper.

According to Lawrence, the intelligence agencies did not examine the DNC’s computers, an omission he calls “beyond preposterous,” and instead relied on a third-party report from Crowdstrike, a non-profit co-founded by Dmitri Alperovitch, described as “vigorously anti-Russian.” The “high confidence” in Russian culpability we heard of again and again in mainstream media reporting is an “evasive term” and “how officials avoid putting their names on the assertions we are so strongly urged to accept,” Lawrence wrote.

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